Traditional wireless network topology may include macrocells and microcells, and increasingly networks may include picocells and femtocells. At the highest level, macrocells are cell sites covering a large physical area, often where traffic densities are low. In areas of increased traffic density, microcells are installed to add network capacity and to improve signal quality. Microcells are typically smaller than macrocells, hence the prefix designations indicating their relative size.
Each macrocell and microcell in a network was typically designed by radio engineers and communications experts to provide a specific cell radius, frequency, and/or power level, factoring in intended capacity and potential interference with other cells. Once a macrocell and microcell had been installed, its parameters were not modified except after careful observation and redesign by the aforementioned radio engineers and communications experts. Despite the extensive wireless network design, many users still find service inadequate at essential locations such as at a user's home or office.
Short-range wireless transceiver devices (e.g. femtocell and picocell device), operating on licensed frequency spectra, are now being deployed to improve the quality of wireless communications at various subscriber site locations. Often these short-range wireless transceiver devices are configured to connect with a particular service network using various common wireline technologies, i.e. a backhaul, including, but not limited to: fiber optic, DSL, powerline, and/or coaxial cable. These transceiver devices may be distributed in such a way as to provide short-range wireless communications services to single-family homes, public businesses (e.g., Starbucks® coffee shops or McDonalds® restaurants), to particular floors within an office building, etc. These short-range range wireless transceiver devices are often the final device in the wireless hierarchy to provide wireless communications to a small group of users.
Femtocells and picocells offer many benefits to both the user and to the network at large. Generally, adding short-range wireless transceiver devices with a backhaul connection helps reduce network loads experienced by macrocells or microcells. Use of a short-range wireless transceiver device may also decrease power consumption of a mobile device connected to the transceiver because the mobile device may transmit and receive at a lower power level. Finally, users may experience a benefit because the use of short-range wireless transceiver devices greatly reduces or eliminates any “dead spots,” or areas of insufficient network coverage.
Expanding a network's resources to include short-range wireless alternatives in highly populated areas can significantly reduce periods of network congestion between various links in a larger data communications network. This can improve a service provider network's Quality of Service (QOS) as well as network service subscribers' collective Quality of Experience (QOE) within a particular portion of a data communications network. Negative effects associated with poor QOS and poor QOE (e.g., conditions largely caused by congestion and/or interference), which can be mitigated by adding a substantial amount of short-range wireless transceiver devices to network infrastructure, may include: queuing delay, data loss, as well as blocking of new and existing network connections for certain network subscribers.
Although adding a variety of short-range wireless communications transceivers to an existing network can improve network throughput in most metropolitan areas, the unplanned placement of these short-range transceiver devices (e.g., femtocell and/or picocell devices) within a given network topology can also have detrimental effects on wireless communications quality within a service provider network. In particular, joining or relocating transportable transceiver devices to the network may inadvertently cause interference amongst the transportable transceiver devices, neighboring base stations, and various user equipment of a wireless network based on existing deployments of network base stations (e.g., macrocell and/or microcell base stations).
Accordingly, without careful frequency and/or radio power level planning within particular regions of a data communications network, both short-range transceiver device and wide-range base station communications could suffer from detrimental interference scenarios. In some problematic scenarios, the interference may be associated with co-channel interference and in other scenarios the interference may be associated with adjacent channel interference. Typically, it is not possible for service providers to keep track of, or even properly plan for, the addition and/or relocation of hundreds or even thousands of transportable short-range transceiver devices residing within portions of a larger data communications network.
Next generation cellular networks (e.g., 3GPP LTE or 4G communications networks) may be able to take advantage of system redundancy associated with heterogeneous mixtures of short-range wireless transceiver devices collocated with wider-range network base stations. These new deployment topologies may result in robust mixtures of network cell coverage within regions of overlapping wireless service. In particular, many modern, low power transceiver devices (e.g., femtocell Home eNodeB devices) are readily transportable within a communications network by end users. This mobility creates the possibility that short-range transceiver devices may be moved to unpredictable locations where their operation could potentially produce substantial interference to surrounding network infrastructure, unless their maximum radio power levels were constrained to reduce unwanted instances of network interference.
Presently, there is a need for improved systems and methods that facilitate ad-hoc deployments of short-range wireless transceiver devices within larger wireless communications networks. It would be beneficial if these deployments could occur while ensuring that the operation of transportable transceiver devices will not interfere with or significantly degrade existing, overlapping network infrastructure (e.g., including static macrocell, microcell, and/or picocell base stations). To date, it has been very difficult for service providers to restrict portable transceiver devices to particular geographic locations (e.g., to lock a transceiver device to a subscriber's residence or place of business). Accordingly, it would also be desirable if these improved systems and methods could be managed by subscriber-deployed equipment (e.g., by transceiver devices that service providers deploy to their network subscribers). This distribution would advantageously affect quality optimization processes amongst a wireless network's resources, such that a particular service provider entity would not need to be independently responsible for impractical resource planning and management tasks, created by unexpected customer relocation and operation of short-range network communications equipment.